FEB 5/6: writing formative essay: wwi

Today in class you will finish writing your formative argumentative essay on WWI.

Just a reminder that this is practice and you will receive feedback on your claim (& the evidence you provide to support your claim) and on your counterclaim (& strategy of using both logos and ethos) to discount and refute other viewpoints while continuing to support your claim. 

While you will not be writing a summative argumentative essay in this unit, this formative essay is important practice in the skill in developing balanced historical arguments, and will help prepare you for the summative debate later in this unit--and for the summative argumentative essay you will be writing in the next unit (Unit 4).  This will also be used for an upcoming Summative Reflection on your ability to develop historical arguments.
For this reason, you are asked to do your best on this formative. 

Helpful resources for today's class: 

• What is an argumentative essay? (OWL Purdue University website)
• Argumentative speech/writing Rubric
• Organizing an Argument (OWL Purdue University website)
• Formal Tone resource here.
• Text Integration resource  here.
• Supporting transitional phrases
• Formative Debate: Causes of WWI Presentation (Google Slides)
• Main Causes of WWI  (Google Slides Presentation)
• WWI - Short and Long-term Causes (PDF Doc)

RIGHT: Here is a sample of a supporting paragraph that shows how to EXPLAIN historical events in a manner that helps the reader understand a sequence of events to support a claim. While this is not an exemplary paragraph, it is simple enough for anyone to understand how to structure a solid "meets" level. What is missing though are the sources. Be sure you add your sources to your supporting paragraphs.

HW: Read article; be prepared to discuss in class

HW: Pick and read ONE of the following articles:

• "The Great Myth: WWI Was No Accident", published by TheDiplomat.com, Aug. 30, 2014
• "WWI: The War That Changed Everything", published by The Wall Street Journal, June 20, 2014

​We will use these for a discussion at the start of next class before we begin taking a look at how WWI ended and the turn of events that led to a failed peace plan.  These articles, while they are editorial opinion pieces marking the 100-year anniversary of the start of WWI, they have some rather provocative ideas and makes predictions and warnings about turbulent times we see in the world today to remind us that the lessons of WWI are still relevant to our lives today.

Do you agree or disagree with these articles' views?